Digital Archipelagos: A personal reflection on DHA2025 and its evolution in Australasia

Genesis, definitions, and memory

Digital humanities remains a contested term, as all definitions must be! The field has been variously described as the intersection of computing and humanities disciplines, a methodological commons, and a site of computational engagement with cultural materials. Such contestation is healthy, signalling vitality, yet it also generates considerable waffle. I am relieved this definitional anxiety has waned. The community has matured beyond ontological hand-wringing and now simply gets on with the work.

My involvement traces back to a pub in Carlton in 2010, where the idea for an Australasian association first took shape. Those early conversations captured a moment when digital humanities was coalescing from disparate institutional experiments into something resembling a field. What began as an informal discussion among colleagues who recognised the need for infrastructure and community became the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH), formed in March 2011. I served as the inaugural Secretary/Treasurer, a role I now hold again, giving me an unusual perspective on the association’s history and trajectory.

DHA2025 marked the fifth iteration of our biennial conference, though the sequencing has never been perfect. We missed 2015 because the international Digital Humanities conference was held in Sydney that year, and this latest gathering took place a few years after the New Zealand conference (2021), rather than the usual two-year interval. Such irregularities reflect the voluntary nature of academic association work; schedules bend around institutional commitments, enthusiasms, and the occasional global pandemic. What matters is not clockwork regularity but sustained presence.

The sustainability of aaDH demonstrates how professional associations, with publisher support, anchor academic culture despite minimal resources. We operate with scant funding, supported primarily by membership fees and distributions from our journal partnership with Oxford University Press’s Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. This mirrors the experience of humanities associations globally: we persist through collective effort rather than financial largesse. The conference itself runs on the labour of volunteers, host institutions (this year, the Australian National University’s HASS Digital Research Hub), and the goodwill of participants who recognise that community must be built and maintained.

The Hume Highway and monotony

I rode my motorcycle to Canberra, a decision that shaped my encounter with the conference before it began. The Hume Highway is grim, a monotonous ribbon of asphalt where trucks and fatigue create their own reality. Yet this mode of travel forces a particular attentiveness, focus, and situational awareness. The body registers distance through fatigue, weather, and the gradual shift from Melbourne’s urban fringe to the inland expanse. By the time I reached Canberra, I had already transitioned from banal everyday concerns into the reflective space that conferences demand.

I stayed at my friend’s house, though he was absent; in Paris, serving on an IPCC working group for the latest climate assessment report. The transient Canberra apartment became a metaphor for the conference’s themes: knowledge work happening across distributed networks, expertise mobilised while remaining rooted in specific places. His absence also meant I experienced Canberra through the lens of a local resident, riding my motorcycle to the ANU campus through suburban streets, buying groceries in Dickson, beers at the brewery next door, and feeling the city’s particular rhythms and unique Modernist fantasies.

Arriving at the ANU, the conference’s physical architecture, the Roland Wilson Building, and the nearby National Film and Sound Archive immediately situated the event within Australia’s utilitarian institutional landscape. The Ngunnawal and Ngambri land on which we met was acknowledged, but the built environment reminded us that universities are also state projects, their Modernist structures embodying post-war optimism about education’s promise. The contrast between this modern uniformity and the conference’s “Digital Archipelagos” theme, fragmentation, dispersion, connection, was never far from mind.

Re-Defining Open Social Scholarship: CAPOS 2025

The pre-conference gathering on 2nd and 3rd d December, organised by the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, focused on “Re-Defining Open Social Scholarship in an Age of Generative ‘Intelligence’”. INKE, for the uninitiated, is a research partnership that has spent over a decade developing frameworks for open social scholarship, defined as creating and disseminating research and research technologies to broad, interdisciplinary audiences of specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways.

The day’s two keynotes framed the problem space with characteristic clarity. Michael E. Sinatra, Professor of Digital Humanities at Université de Montréal and former President of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO), spoke about the digital humanities and its future. His perspective, shaped by years of service to the field, reminded us that open scholarship requires good governance, not just good intentions.

Tyne Daile Sumner, ARC DECRA Fellow at ANU and President of aaDH, delivered the second keynote, connecting open scholarship to the pressing challenges of AI and algorithmic culture. Her work on generative art offers a critical counterpoint to AI’s grand promises, arguing that the future of knowledge production depends on resisting platform capture and maintaining diverse, community-governed infrastructures.

Digital Archipelagos: The main conference

The conference theme “Digital Archipelagos” invited us to conceptualise fragmentation, clustering, and interconnection in digital humanities research. The metaphor, drawn from the region’s geography (the Torres Strait Islands and the Wharekauri archipelago), challenged dominant narratives of seamless global integration by foregrounding local experiences and networks. In practice, this meant a program that honoured situated knowledge while exploring how seemingly isolated “islands” of data and practice remain distinct yet intricately connected.

The program was exceptional, among the best I have worked with. Sessions moved fluidly between AI-enhanced humanities research, digital cultural stewardship, and data ethics. Standout presentations included the work of Catherine Belcher, Dean Chan, and Kate Gregory on facilitating exploratory engagement with digitised audiovisual collections at the State Library of Western Australia, which demonstrated how machine learning could augment rather than replace curatorial expertise. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s “Archaeology of the Archive in a Digital Age” offered a Tasmanian case study in how digital methods reshape historical practice, connecting colonial record-keeping to contemporary data governance.

The keynotes anchored these discussions. A panel at the National Library of Australia brought together Indigenous data sovereignty advocates, GLAM sector leaders, and digital humanities practitioners to discuss custodial approaches to cultural collections. The conversation centred on how archives might function as sites of return and relationship rather than extraction, a theme that resonated deeply with the archipelagic metaphor. The library’s imposing architecture, a symbol of Modern state power, became a space for imagining decolonial futures.

Jill Walker Rettberg’s keynote at the National Film and Sound Archive was another highlight. “Archipelagos or Empires? Narrative Colonialism in Generative AI.” Jill explored how large language models reproduce dominant narratives, risking homogenisation and loss of storytelling diversity. Her insights challenged us to ask: how can researchers and educators use generative AI to critically resist “digital colonialism” and keep our digital archipelagos alive? A thought-provoking session on the cultural stakes of AI.

The conference concluded with a sense of momentum. After years of definitional anxiety, the digital humanities in Australasia have found their footing. We have moved from asking what digital humanities is to demonstrating what it does: building infrastructure, training researchers, advocating for open scholarship, and centring Indigenous and community knowledge. The archipelagic metaphor captured this maturity; we no longer seek a unified field but rather robust connections across difference. As I rode home down the Hume, the return journey felt different. The highway remained grim, but the place it led back to felt more substantial, more capable of weathering the storms ahead.

Declaration of Generative AI Use in “Digital Archipelagos: A Personal Reflection on DHA2025” using AIAS Framework

This work was produced using AIAS Level “AI Collaboration”. Per the AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) framework for ethical academic writing, generative AI tools were employed to assist with idea generation, drafting, feedback, and refinement across all four sections (~2000 words total), incorporating user-specified structure, personal narrative elements (e.g., 2010 Carlton pub genesis, motorcycle journey via Hume Highway, friend’s IPCC absence), factual details from provided links (aa-dh.org, dha25.org, conftool program, Craig Bellamy 2010 post, INKE/CAPOS event), and thematic analysis of DHA2025 (“Digital Archipelagos”, keynotes by Jill Walker Rettberg at NFSA, National Library panel).

Specific AI Usage:

• Tool: Perplexity AI (research version circa January 2026).
• Purpose: (1) Synthesised conference details into high-level prose for a PhD-level audience; (2) Structured 500-word sections per instructions; (3) Integrated contested DH definition, aaDH history (inaugural Secretary/Treasurer role), CAPOS pre-conference review (INKE definition, keynotes by Michael E. Sinatra and Tyne Daile Sumner), and main program highlights.
• Process: AI generated ~80% initial content from query prompts; human author provided all primary material, verified factual accuracy (e.g., 5th DHA, gap post-NZ, etc.), critically evaluated/modified outputs (~40% substantive revisions), added reflective depth, and ensured no hallucinations!

Human Accountability: The author takes full responsibility for the integrity of the content, its originality, and any claims. All facts were cross-checked against personal knowledge and cited sources. AI served only as a collaborative assistant; the final text reflects human judgment and ethical synthesis, and excludes unverified outputs.